I.

Introduction

Maine, one of the New England states of the United States, bordered on the north and east by the Canadian province of New Brunswick; on the south by the Gulf of Maine (an arm of the Atlantic Ocean); on the west by New Hampshire; and on the north-west by Quebec Province. The Saint John and St Francis rivers form part of the northern boundary, the St Croix River forms part of the south-eastern boundary, and the Salmon Falls River forms part of the south-western boundary. West Quoddy Head, a small peninsula in the south-eastern part of the state, is the easternmost point of land of the United States.

Maine entered the Union on March 15, 1820, when it was separated from Massachusetts to form the 23rd state. Manufacturing began to play a leading role in the Maine economy in the late 19th century. Tourism is also an important industry, and the state’s extensive fisheries are noted for producing lobsters. The name Maine probably originated as the word used by English explorers to refer to the mainland; it may also be derived from the province and region of Maine in north-western France. Maine is known as the “Pine Tree State”.

II.

Land and Resources

Maine has an area of 87,389 sq km (33,741 sq mi). The state’s extreme dimensions are 500 km (311 mi) from north to south and 325 km (202 mi) from east to west. Maine’s coastline extends 367 km (228 mi); its tidal shoreline is 5,597 km (3,478 mi), which includes the coasts of the many offshore islands.

A.

Physical Geography

Maine can be divided into three major geographical regions: the Seaboard Lowland, the New England Upland, and the White Mountains. Along the coast is the Seaboard Lowland, composed of a rolling landscape cut by numerous bays and estuaries. One of the most spectacular rocky headlands is the granite mass of Cadillac Mountain on Mount Desert Island, the state’s largest island. Most of Maine consists of a part of the New England Upland. The highest elevations in Maine are found in the White Mountains region, which extends into New Hampshire and Vermont.

Maine has more than 5,100 rivers and streams, most of which are swift flowing. Drainage is towards the Atlantic Ocean, chiefly via the Saint John, St Croix, Penobscot, Kennebec, Androscoggin, and Saco rivers. There are also more than 2,200 lakes and ponds.

B.

Climate

Maine has three principal climatological areas: the coastal, northern interior, and southern interior divisions. The coastal division has a maritime climate. The northern interior division has a continental climate. The southern interior division is the warmest part of Maine. North Bridgton here in 1911 recorded the state’s highest temperature, 40.6° C (105° F).

C.

Plants and Animals

Almost 80 per cent of Maine is covered with forest, about two thirds of which is made up of softwoods such as white pine, pitch pine, Norway pine, and spruce. Cranberries are widely distributed in the marshlands. White-tailed deer are numerous, and other large mammals include moose and black bear. Seals live along the coast. Among the many birds of Maine are chickadees, sparrows, and cormorants.

D.

Resources, Products, and Industries

As in the other New England states, metallic minerals have never been important in Maine. Non-metallic minerals found in the state include asbestos, sand and gravel, and gemstones. Principal farm and agricultural products include potatoes, dairy products, chicken eggs, and blueberries.

A considerable amount of pulp for paper-making and timber is produced from Maine’s many forests. The state is famous for its seafood and has an important fishing industry, with lobster the most valuable product. Leading manufactured goods are paper and wood products, footwear and other leather goods, and textiles. Shipbuilding is an important industry.

III.

Population

Maine had 1,317,207 (2007 estimate) inhabitants. Whites made up 98.4 per cent of the population in 1990 and blacks 0.4 per cent. In addition, the population included 5,945 Native Americans, the largest groups being the Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy, as well as some 1,262 people of Chinese ancestry, 1,058 people of Filipino descent, 858 people of Korean origin, and 642 people of Vietnamese extraction. Approximately 6,800 people were of Latino background, and a substantial number of people were of French-Canadian origin.

Its major cities are the capital Augusta (18,626 (2005 estimate)); Portland (63,889 (2005 estimate)); Leinston; Bangor (31,074 (2005 estimate)); Auburn (23,602 (2005 estimate)); and South Portland (23,742 (2005 estimate)).

A.

Education

In the late 1990s Maine spent about US$7,670 on each student's education, compared to a national average of about US$6,835.

At the beginning of the 21st century Maine had 33 institutions of higher education. Major institutions included the University of Maine (1865), at Orono; the University of Southern Maine (1878), at Portland; Bates College (1855), at Lewiston; Bowdoin College (1794), at Brunswick; and Husson College (1898), at Bangor.

B.

Places of Interest

A prime attraction is Acadia National Park, mostly on Mount Desert Island, which includes rugged coastal areas. Mount Katahdin, in Baxter State Park, is the northern terminus of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, which runs south to Georgia. Roosevelt Campobello International Park, encompassing the summer home of the family of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, is on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, Canada, near Maine.

Numerous mansions, old houses, and rural churches recall Maine’s past. St Croix Island International Historic Site, near Calais, encompasses the site of a short-lived French settlement of 1604-1605. In Burnham Tavern (1770), in Machias, Americans plotted the capture (1775) of the British warship Margaretta in the first naval encounter of the American War of Independence. The Wadsworth-Longfellow House, in Portland, was the childhood home of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Maine has a variety of cultural institutions. Among the state’s museums are the Portland Museum of Art, with a significant collection of 19th-century American painting; the Farnsworth Art Museum and Wyeth Center, in Rockland; the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, in Brunswick, with a large collection of European, American, and Asian art; the Maine State Museum, in Augusta, with displays on historical, ethnographical, and scientific topics; the Robert Abbe Museum of Stone Age Antiquities, in Acadia National Park near Northeast Harbor; the Hudson Museum of the University of Maine, an anthropological museum, in Orono; the Penobscot Marine Museum; the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Museum, near Poland Spring, with buildings and handicrafts of a Shaker religious group founded in the late 18th century; and the Colby Museum of Art, in Waterville.

C.

Government and Politics

Maine is governed under a constitution that became effective in 1820, the year in which the state entered the Union. The chief executive, and the only popularly elected executive official, is the governor, who is elected to a four-year term. The governor may serve no more than two consecutive terms. The legislature elects the secretary of state, state treasurer, and attorney-general.

Legislative authority is vested in a legislature consisting of a 151-member House of Representatives and a 35-member Senate. All legislators are elected to two-year terms. At a national level, the state elects two senators and two representatives to the US Congress. Maine has four electoral votes in presidential elections.

The Republican Party dominated politics from the 1850s to the 1950s, when the Democrats began to show considerable strength at the state and local levels. In 1968 Edmund S. Muskie, a US senator from Maine, was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. His party carried Maine that year.

In the 2006 elections, two Democrats were returned to represent the state. Senators Susan M. Collins and Olympia Snowe (both Republican) represent Maine. Incumbent Democrat governor John Baldacci was elected to a second term in office in 2006, beating Chandler Woodcock (Republican).

IV.

History

At the time of the arrival of the Europeans, Maine was inhabited by some 20 related Algonquian tribes, united in a loose organization known as the Abenaki or Wabanaki (“people of the dawn”). Only the Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy remain today. Many were converted to Roman Catholicism by French missionaries in the 17th century and fought on the side of the French in their wars against the English.

A.

Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

Laying claim to all of New England, based on the explorations of John Cabot a century earlier, King James I of England authorized the Plymouth Company to colonize the area in 1606. The following year the company founded a settlement at the mouth of the Kennebec River on Sagadahoc Peninsula, but it lasted only a year. French settlements on St Croix Island and on Mount Desert Island also failed.

In 1620 King James named John Mason and Sir Ferdinando Gorges proprietors of lands between the Merrimac and Kennebec rivers, but they did little to develop the region, and in 1658 Massachusetts asserted its jurisdiction over Maine; in 1691 it became part of Massachusetts.

Although there was some land speculation before the American War of Independence, Maine remained primarily a source of furs, timber, and forest products. During the Revolution the British established a base near present-day Castine, on Penobscot Bay. The Penobscot expedition (1779), in which a Massachusetts force tried to expel them, was a disastrous failure.

B.

Independence

The movement to separate from Massachusetts began in 1785, but it did not pick up momentum until 1816, when the Brunswick Convention popularized the separatist movement. In 1819, when the Massachusetts General Court agreed to an Act of Separation, a state constitutional convention was held in Portland. Maine petitioned Congress for admission to the Union in December 1819 and was admitted under the Missouri Compromise as the 23rd state in 1820. Maine was first prominent in national affairs for its leadership in the temperance movement in the 1820s and its adoption of a prohibition law in 1851.

By the time Maine won independence, about half its total land area had been distributed; much of the remainder was still unsurveyed, and a dispute developed about the boundary separating Maine from the Canadian province of New Brunswick. By the late 1830s both Canadian and Maine forestry workers sought control of disputed territory in present-day Aroostook County. The so-called Aroostook War was ended by US forces under General Winfield Scott, and the boundary issue was resolved by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842.

C.

Maine’s Changing Society

Before the American Civil War, Maine’s economy expanded as it supplied the nation with timber products and with ice for food packing. Other emerging industries were lime and granite quarrying, textile milling, fishing, and shipbuilding. Transport needs encouraged railway construction. After the American Civil War, the emergence of steel-hulled ships and the movement of the textile industry out of New England contributed to economic decline. Maine increasingly relied on the paper and pulp industries, and beginning in the 1880s tourism became a major industry.

The state remained predominantly Republican in the first half of the 20th century. By the mid-1950s the Democrats began to be successful, twice electing Edmund Muskie as governor. He achieved national prominence as a US senator and later as Secretary of State under President Jimmy Carter. Another prominent Maine Democrat, George Mitchell, was elected majority leader of the US Senate in 1988.

Maine suffered from both rural and urban poverty after World War II. Issues involving energy and the environment aroused major controversies in the 1970s and 1980s, as citizens’ groups repeatedly tried and failed to revoke the licence of the state’s lone nuclear power plant. The 1980s brought an economic boom to Maine, as to most of New England; between 1980 and 1989.